Based on the author’s persona, the protagonist in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno journeys through hell, which happens to have nine circles that punish precise sinners in each, with Virgil acting as the guide. Throughout his time in hell, Dante witnesses the punishing of different souls for various sins committed on earth and for that reason, themes of justice and the punishment of evil dominate the work. It is on the given note that Charles Allen Dinsmore begins his writing on The Moral System of Dante's “Inferno” to determine the punishable sins in the tale and at the same time reveal the author’s view of right and wrong.
According to Dinsmore, seven capital dispositions taint the soul, and as long as an individual possesses one, or more, of them, he or she cannot approach heaven and in the case of Inferno, is bound to hell. Subsequently, the traits include “pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, [and] lust”, all of which depict one of the seven deadly sins (625). The problem is, as Dinsmore points out, in Dante’s Inferno, only four sins are evident in the circles of hell: [Impurity], gluttony, avarice, and wrath (626). Hence, with the three missing sins in mind, Dinsmore questions the foundations of morality in Dante’s work and the grounds on which the author does not present all the mentioned dispositions. By extension, Dinsmore proposes two possible answers for his discovery either Dante eliminated the three because of artistic purposes, or his moral system is merely different from the one that religion and society dictate.
In answer, Dinsmore writes that in Dante’s understanding of right and wrong, an act is punishable based on itself and not necessarily the “sinful motives that prompted” its execution (626). For instance, envy may prompt one person to steal and another one to kill for that which they are envious, the two culprits will be answerable for theft and murder respectively (Dante, XXXI.19-127). Hence, the moral system of Dante's Inferno grounds punishment on the “result” and “intention” of an action and not the driving force behind the same (Dinsmore, 627).
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. "Inferno." The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. Ed. arah Lawall, Lee Patterson, Patricia Meyer Spacks, William G. Thalmann and Heather James. Trans. Mark Musa. 9. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. 1465-1576. Print.
Dinsmore, Charles Allen. "The Moral System of Dante's "Inferno"." The American Journal of Theology 13,.4 (1909): 625-628. JSTOR. Web. <http://www.jstor.org>.
